


Instant Capture

by tisfan



Series: The Fish Tank and other Creature AUs [7]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abduction, M/M, Magic, Revenge, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-02 05:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14538102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: Normal people get their belongings stolen on vacation, not flung into an alternate dimension where they encounter their fishy dopplegangers.





	Instant Capture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flight_Of_Icarus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flight_Of_Icarus/gifts).



> Imagine that Bucky gets flung across universes after a magical accident of some kind (exact details up to you) and winds up in a world where he and Tony are mer people (species your choice, but I am partial to octobucky). Anyway, MCU Bucky 'lands' in this world over the open ocean and this is bad because he has a metal arm dragging him down anytime he tries to swim. But Mer Tony and Mer Bucky save him, and keep him alive until MCU Tony can haul him home.

“Back up, just a little,” the man said, holding up the old fashioned camera. A Kodak relic from the 70s, the device was one of those with the card of disposable flash bulbs that popped and sparked and were good for one roll of film. Bucky could smell the chemicals as the flash went off; he grinned wide for the camera.

Tony wasn’t with him; Pepper had called earlier, despite promising not to bother them on their vacation, and Tony had kissed Bucky’s cheek apologetically and sent Bucky out to get them breakfast from one of the nearby cafes.

The old man with his camera had implored Bucky -- an American tourist, even if he’d been to Italy more than a dozen times in the last few decades, practically lived there for most of 1952, honestly -- to let him take a photo to remember everything by.

Bucky thought Tony might get a kick out of the ancient camera, might like a photo of their vacation to remember things by. Also, Tony’d given Bucky way more money than they needed to pay for breakfast -- nothing new -- and Bucky tended to give the change out to panhandlers and street entertainment.

“Say _addio_ ,” the man said, and while Bucky’s eyebrow went up -- say goodbye? What? -- he did as he was told. The flash went off. The man laughed, delighted. Malicious. “Goodbye, _Soldat_.”

Everything went white.

***

When Bucky didn’t come back, with breakfast, Tony wasn’t entirely worried. He and Pepper had been video conferencing since ridiculously early about the breakthrough that Wallace had in R&D and the implications thereof. It was exciting for him, for SI, but it scarcely fascinating for someone outside the company.

But Tony was hungry, and he hadn’t had caffeine, and when he checked the clock, Bucky had been gone for over four hours, and that wasn’t right. Bucky wasn’t like Tony, not apt to wander off, distracted by the next shiny object. If nothing else, he’d have texted (Tony checked, he hadn’t) or at least come back with Tony’s breakfast.

Tony didn’t like feeling like he was taking his boyfriend for granted -- and he really, really tried not to, but sometimes he still got distracted -- but Bucky was still struggling with his Hydra training. The man checked in. Always.

The fact that he hadn’t sent a wriggle of dismay threading its way through Tony’s gut. He snatched up his gauntlet-watch and strapped it on.

“Hey boss,” Friday said in his ear as soon as the wireless connection did its handshake.

“Fri, where’s Bucky?”

Stalker 101 or not, Tony was already headed for the door when Friday reported back.

“Boss, I’m not picking up any signs of him. His phone’s not online, and there are no energy signatures emanating from the prosthetic.

“Check street cams, footage, back it up, he went out for breakfast--”

Tony pushed through the door and a manilla envelope fluttered to the hall of their hotel and lay there on the floor, his name scrawled in black marker across the front.

Tony scowled. “Scan it.”

“Not detecting any harmful chemicals, boss,” Friday said, and through Tony’s sunglasses, she projected an xray of the contents, a single sheet of paper and a photograph. Primitive.

“Alert the Avengers,” Tony snapped, scooping up what was, undoubtedly, some sort of ransom demand. “We’ve got an Amber Alert.”

Funny calling the Amber Alert on someone else -- usually Tony was the one damselled. Funny, suspicious, not funny ha-ha.

 What he wanted to know was who the hell had their hands on his boyfriend.

***

There were hands on him. Bucky struggled and something ropey and thick coiled around his wrist, pulling his arm back, keeping him from lashing out. It was enormously strong. Another coil wrapped around his waist, a third over his mouth and nose. He couldn’t breathe.

Panic took over and he thrashed. It was wet. He was… wet. Underwater? He forced his eyes open, they stung. Salt water?

A hand touched his face, cold, but gentle. He could barely see, eyes slitted almost shut. He couldn’t breathe. Blue eyes, glowing and kind and weirdly familiar, met his gaze.

“Mmmmph!”

The face was as familiar as his own. Tony, and yet… not. This Tony had blue eyes that glowed like the arc-reactor. The light didn’t show much more than not-Tony’s face. He smiled, revealing disturbingly sharp teeth. Slits in his throat moved with each breath, showing pale pink flesh underneath. He moved closer and the thing covering Bucky’s mouth slid aside.

The Not-Tony wrapped cold arms around Bucky’s neck, pulled himself in, turned his head and slotted their mouths together.

Bucky would never have allowed it, but he was dizzy with lack of air, he was confused, cold, scared. The Not-Tony kissed him, and pushed… breathing into Bucky’s mouth. Air.

Oh, sweet christ, _air_. Bucky gulped at it, and the Not-Tony kept opening and closing those slits at his throat. Gills, Bucky suddenly realized, and he almost spit out the Not-Tony’s precious gift in his shock and panic.

Able to breathe, even if it tasted cold and somewhat of fish, and Bucky’s tongue cringed away from the sharp teeth, his head cleared a little. He realized the thing holding him was a cephalopod of some sort -- squid or octopus, and not attached to the Not-Tony, who had a brilliant red fish tail.

 _Mermaid_?

How the fuck did any of this make sense? Normal people, when they got robbed while on vacation, lost some money and their passports; they didn’t get flung into some alternate dimension.

Bucky pulled his mouth free, tried to demand answers, got as far as “who--” in a rush of bubbles. The Tony-mer gave him an elaborate eyeroll and a condescending smirk that was so familiar that Bucky missed his Tony with a profound ache. The Tony-mer held one hand to his ear and then shook his head. _I can’t hear you. I don’t understand._

Bucky struggled to orient himself. The water around them was dark, heavy. He pointed up -- or at least, he thought it was up. For all he knew, they could be upside down. Gravity didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, this far down. However far it was. Wherever the hell he was.

The Tony-mer leaned in and shared his air again.

Mimicked Bucky’s gesture, up. Pointed to his own throat, then shook his head again. _I can’t go up._

Well, this was a fancy pickle. How long until Tony-mer got bored with this?

Bucky twisted, trying to see the other creature and almost panicked again.

The monster holding him… was himself.

Only not. The Bucky holding him was some sort of alien, half-man, half-squid. _Tentacles_ , Bucky thought, wildly. Poor Tony’s missing this. He knew it was a squid, two of the long limbs hanging below the Bucky-creature’s waist ended in flat, rounded spades, and there were… Bucky tried to count, but it looked like Bucky-creature had met with an accident, himself. One of the creature’s arms was missing from the shoulder down, ending in a scarred stump, and two of the ropey arms were quite a bit shorter than their fellows.

 _No Hydra to give him a prosthetic_ , Bucky thought.

Tony-mer kissed him again, shared air. Despite his solicitous, the entire operation was tedious. How long before even Tony-mer got tired of this? Bucky couldn’t stay down here. The mers couldn’t go up. Two of the Bucky-creature’s arms slid around Bucky and the Tony-mer, squeezing and locking them together, which was a lot less sexy than when he and Tony had fantasized about tentacle porn.

The rest of the Bucky-squids limbs drew in, then pushed off with a powerful stroke, sending them speeding through the water. Bucky tried to relax; they didn’t mean him harm. It would have been easy to just… let him drown. The Tony-mer petted his cheek a few times, one hand behind Bucky’s neck to keep their mouths together.

 _It’s not cheatin’ if I’m kissin’ you, doll,_ Bucky thought, and wondered if he’d ever see his Tony again.

***

“This is some next-level Hogwarts shit right here,” Tony said. He tossed the photograph down on the table, where it shifted and moved like a badly filmed movie. One of those old nature documentaries from the 70s.

Steve picked it up, gingerly. There was no sound, just the moving creatures in it, what appeared to be a mermaid and a gruesome squid-man hybrid. It was hard to see details, there wasn’t a lot of light wherever they were.

Tony might have dismissed the entire thing, except when the mermaid moved, Tony got a glimpse of Bucky’s face, lit strangely from some blueish bioluminescence. Whatever this was, Bucky was in danger. He was wrapped up by the squid-thing, and, what little Tony could detect, the mer-creature was either kissing him, or biting him.

When Tony could see Bucky’s face, he didn’t look in pain, although he was, justifiably, terrified.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Someone left it outside my hotel,” Tony said. He gripped the table with both hands, barely able to keep from screaming with rage, frustration, fear.

“He’s not drowning,” Steve pointed out, even as his own voice shook. Steve had powerful feelings about drowning that might have even beaten out Tony’s own trauma.

“But where is he?”

“May I?” Wanda was always very, very careful whenever she spoke with Tony. They’d come to some sort of peace, but issues of consent were still a touchy area.

Tony jerked his chin up and down, not even able to talk.

She twisted her fingers over the picture, red smoke and glitter falling from her fingertips as she worked her magic.

 _Magic_ , Tony sneered mentally, then stopped himself. If Wanda could find out anything, any way to bring Bucky back, he’d give the whole magicphobia a rest. Probably.

Maybe.

“Oh,” she said. “Um… the man who did this had a personal grudge against the Winter Soldier. This film is absolutely saturated by his hatred and glee. His… father? A defecting… oh. A sorcerer. Like Strange, but not as strong. He passed down… artifacts, to his son. The Winter Soldier killed the man. But the boy grew up and learned to use them.”

“So?” Steve said, and Tony was grateful, because he didn’t know how to ask. “What do we do?”

“We get the artifact,” Wanda said. “Something like this? We should be able to just reverse it, once we have the… it’s probably a camera.”

***

Bucky didn’t know where they were taking him, but he was exhausted. He couldn’t rest, couldn’t think. There was Tony-mer’s mouth on him, the cold water around them. The movement of the Bucky-monster.

Another thing was moving in the water, a glitter of reddish skin and a swish of water.

Wanda’s face appeared in the darkness. Her dark hair surrounded her like a stormcloud, and she moved her hands, forming streams of red water and bubbles, and then she reached for him and touched his throat.

The Tony-mer backed off and made an encouraging gesture. _Go ahead._

Bucky didn’t know what they wanted of him.

The Wanda-creature was… a starfish? Her thick legs hung below her waist like a skirt. She was naked from the waist up, they all were, but it hadn’t occurred to Bucky that it was an issue, until he was presented with Wanda’s full breasts. He blushed, or would have, if his blood had been warmer, but he was so cold, and he couldn’t breathe and the Tony-mer wasn’t moving to share his air, and Bucky…

...gasped.

There was a splitting agony in his throat, and then water flowed into his mouth, but it was sweet,  not bitter with salt, not cold, but cool.

“There you are,” Tony-mer said, and Bucky understood him. “That’s better, right?

“Where’d you get this?” the Bucky creature demanded, wrapping one limb around the metal wrist.

“My…” Bucky marvelled. His voice didn’t exactly come from his throat, it was as if just thinking about the words put them out there. “My Tony made it for me.” He didn’t bother to mention that it was after his Tony had ripped the old one off him, either, or that the original one had come from an enemy the likes of which he couldn’t possibly explain. No need to share that trauma with his doppleganger.

“Get on that, fishtail,” Bucky-creature said to the Tony-mer. “Tired of bein’ lopsided.”

Tony-mer made a gesture that Bucky both did not understand, and intimately understood at the same time; whatever the sea creature equivalent of fuck you was, a pinch of thumb and two fingers and then violently spreading them.

“What happened to… you?” Bucky asked.

Tony-mer looked sober, almost sad. “I might have led him under a rockslide. We had to cut the limbs off, to get him free.”

 “We’ve been over this, seashell,” the Bucky-creature said. “I forgive you. An’ I deserved it.” He gave Bucky a conspiratorial glance. “Mighta been tryin’ to eat him, but can you blame me?”

“My Tony’s pretty tasty, too,” Bucky said, grinning back at himself, which was sooo weird.

“Obviously, you don’t belong here,” Wanda-star said, breaking things up with a swish of one hand and two of her arms. “How do we get you back where you’re supposed to be?”

“I don’t even know where _here_ is,” Bucky protested. “I was gettin’ my picture taken, and then I was here.”

“I don’t understand this word. What’s… picture? And how does someone take it from you?”

***

“He’s teaching art class to fish,” Tony said, raising an eyebrow. “Tell me you got something.”

“What? Lemme see that,” Steve said, grabbing for the picture. Sure enough, there was Bucky, using one rock to scrape patterns on the wall on an undersea cavern. Drawing stick figures. He was bad at it, Steve had always been the artist of the two of them.

The mer-people had taken him to some sort of cavern, they’d obviously adopted him as some sort of mascot, which wasn’t unusual, Tony supposed. If a Bucky-doppleganger had shown up unexpectedly around a group of Avengers, they’d have some sort of centaur-Bucky and making do until they could figure out how to get him home, so it was only fair.

Wanda, Strange, Clint, even Scott, had joined in the search for the wizard with the camera. Tony was on standby, in case they needed the firepower, but he was too distracted to be away from the photograph for long, so for the last week or so, he’d been watching Bucky get better, down where it was wetter.

Bucky-squid was almost always with him, a tentacle or arm wrapped around one of Bucky’s legs, so he didn’t float or drift away. Their version of Wanda had made it so Bucky could breathe.

What they were having problems with, and Tony was getting desperately worried about it, was that Bucky couldn’t seem to eat much of their food, and salt water wasn’t hydrating him. He was getting weaker, every day. Super soldiers needed a hell of a lot of calories.

“We got it,” Wanda reported. “Clint and Sam are taking turns intimidating our wizard, so we can reverse the spell, but hopefully they’ll get him to tell us, soon. Stephen is looking it over, as well. He might be able to reverse engineer it.”

“I refuse to allow the word _engineer_ to be in the same sentence as _magicking_ anything,” Tony said. He was still watching Bucky, who was leaning heavily on his counterpart as he silently explained things to the various sea-life surrounding him.

“All right,” Strange said, at that moment, striding into the room, his cloak sweeping along behind him. “I believe I have got it.”

“Have you?”

“He exists inside the picture, in their world,” Strange explained, and then Tony lost him because Strange started using words like aetherical translocation, and positively charged chakra and Tony was certain those words meant something to Strange, and maybe to Wanda, but they didn’t mean anything to Tony, and what’s more, he seldom wanted them to.

“Twelve centers of focus?” Wanda burst out, “are you insane?”

“Do you want the ocean to come flooding in? If so, carry on winging it. I like a little stability in my transdimensional portals, thank you.”

Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. “I hate both of you.”

“Look, there’s no reason why a Tyrean pattern won’t work,” Wanda said. “They’re far more stable than you’re giving them credit for.”

“Perhaps, but if we do twelve, then I know at least my six are working,” Strange retorted.

Wanda huffed. “I can hold up my end, old man, if you can hold up yours.”

“I’m thirty seven,” Strange pointed out.

“What?”

“Thirty seven. That’s hardly old.”

“Did you just… make a joke?” Tony burst in. “You make jokes? Why did I not know that? Enough, enough, can you do it?”

“Of course,” Strange said. He held out one hand to Wanda. “Anchor your essence, if you please.”

“Just because you had to do things the hard way,” Wanda said, but she threw one hand gesture behind her, sending a shimmer of red energy that grabbed onto the ground like one of Peter’s sticky-webs.

“Together, on three,” Strange said. “One…”

“Two.”

“Three.” Tony crossed his fingers, hating himself for doing it and doing it anyway. Tony didn’t believe in luck.

Of course, on his better days, Tony didn’t much believe in magic either, and look how that was working out for him.

He stared down at the enchanted photograph while Strange and Wanda focused on the magic camera (Tony hated every word in that sentence.)

In the photograph, Bucky’s head jerked up, he turned and for the first time, Tony thought maybe he was, somehow, aware of the photograph. He looked right at Tony. His mouth moved soundlessly, and then he was hugging the squid-version of himself, then the Tony-mer, and then he swam toward the photograph.

“We’ve got him,” Strange reported, and then-- with a wet splash, the photograph tore in half and Bucky, dripping wet and shivering, was gasping for air in the middle of the floor.

“Oh, god, Bucky, honey,” Tony cried, and then he was there, his arms around his shivering, soaked boyfriend, as Bucky coughed and spluttered.

“I’m okay,” he said, finally, tucking his face against Tony’s throat. “I’m okay, baby. I’m here, I’m home, oh, god.” And then Bucky was sobbing, clutching Tony tight. “Didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. They didn’t know how t’ get me back. _Oh, Tony_.”

“Honey,” Tony said, seriously, “I will never stop looking for you. Never. Promise.”

Bucky was nodding, and Steve threw a blanket down over him, which Tony used to start rubbing him dry and warm.

“I tell ya, babe,” Bucky said, after a while, “I never, ever want to go deep-sea divin’ again.”

“Yeah? Under the sea’s not for you?”

“Well, you had a real cute tail, down there,” Bucky mentioned, “but I think legs are to be preferred.”


End file.
